“Hii saa bri… (We have eaten the forest…),” followed by the name of a specific place, is how the Mnông Gar, or Phil Brêe (“people of the forest”), refer to a particular year. These semi-nomadic swidden cultivators of Việt Nam’s Central Highlands mark the flow of time through space—specifically, the patches of forest they clear and burn each year for cultivation. This concept forms the core of Georges Condominas’s masterpiece, We Have Eaten the Forest.
In the village of Sar Luk, Condominas and the Mnông Gar “ate the Gôo God-Stone forest,” the villagers’ name for the agricultural year lasting from late November 1948 to early December 1949. Because the Mnông Gar have no unified system for naming time, each village uses a different name corresponding to the section of forest they “eat” within their territory.
When the community eventually returns to land cultivated decades earlier, they reuse the old name, perhaps appending a village name or notable event to distinguish the cycles. For them, time has never been a linear progression.
Condominas’s journey to write this text was as dramatic as the culture he studied. In the 1940s, leaving Sorbonne University to undertake fieldwork in Sar Luk, he spent two years living among the villagers. He did not, however, complete his planned thesis. Instead, after emerging from a deep coma to find his legs paralyzed—a moment where he felt his “life was in danger”—he used his remaining strength to write this book.
When his academic advisor expressed frustration at this deviation, Condominas replied that “friendship is more important than a career path, and it compels me to express my gratitude to the people who allowed me to live among them for two years.” The manuscript, a “message of friendship,” was completed in 1955.
The era in which Condominas conducted his fieldwork marked the height of reforms in anthropological research, when scholars left their “armchairs” behind to embrace participant observation. Yet, unlike many contemporary studies that remained heavy with theory and analysis, We Have Eaten the Forest is a “purely descriptive ethnographic document.” It functions as a “descriptive diary,” recording daily activities among the Mnông Gar of Sar Luk during the year of “eating the Gôo God-Stone forest.”
Condominas adopted this documentary approach to capture the “sensory, vivid reality of that social structure within its ‘historic’ setting.” He noted that “if we restore all the observed events, it may happen that a specialist will recognize the importance of data that we ourselves may have overlooked in a stubbornly focused study.”
To achieve this, Condominas immersed himself completely. He was fluent in Mnông Gar, allowing him to live alongside the villagers without an interpreter, although he did hire a local assistant. Despite his immersion, he sought to minimize his “influence” on the village’s collective activities. He remained acutely aware of his unusual status as a Frenchman—within the community but not fully belonging to it—and made every effort to maintain the distance necessary for honest observation.
One detail in the book is particularly impossible to ignore: the moment the researcher confronts what he perceives as injustice. In Chapter Three, “The Incestuous Love Affair and the Suicide of the Handsome Tieeng,” a young man takes his own life over heartbreak. Among the Mnông Gar, suicide is a “bad death” (ndrieng), and mourning for the deceased is forbidden. The villagers blamed Aang, the woman Tieeng loved, intending to force her into servitude for the elder Chaar.
Here, Condominas abandoned detachment. Believing Aang was innocent, he intervened, voicing an opinion that the villagers ultimately accepted, sparing her from slavery. He justified this breach of protocol famously:
“It might have been more proper for me to remain indifferent and let events unfold normally, contenting myself with coldly recording their course—especially when one has the ‘good fortune’ to witness such a singular affair. But an ethnographer is not a recording machine, and in my view, the benefit drawn from such observations would have been purchased at too high a price if it meant that a woman had to become a slave—particularly since I believed her to be innocent.”
This moment is compelling because Condominas prioritized his humanity over his role as an ethnographer. However, it raises a difficult question: Was he imposing a “superior” gaze, judging a community by foreign moral standards? This remains the classic dilemma for any observer, ethnographer, or journalist.
Ultimately, We Have Eaten the Forest is more than a record of the Mnông Gar in Sar Luk before historical upheavals and politics changed their world. It is an engagement with the reflections and devotion of a man writing a “gift of friendship” on his deathbed. I have omitted many specific ethnographic details here because they cannot be separated from the broader context of the research. Instead, I hope this review persuades you to open the book and experience it for yourself.
Thanh Anh wrote this article in Vietnamese and published it in Luật Khoa Magazine on Feb. 10, 2026. Đàm Vĩnh Hằng translated it into English for The Vietnamese Magazine.
